Bypass Censorship: 3 Ways to Access Blocked Website

Web censorship is rampant throughout the world. Most of us encounter it every day. Your workplace might have blocked social networking websites like facebook or has stopped access to your personal email. Universities and colleges too censor their network usually. If you are really unlucky, and live in a country like China, your government also censors the web.

In this guide, we list out some of the easiest ways to bypass censorship.

The Onion Router Network

More commonly known as TOR network. TOR is a non-profit organization that helps people protect their anonymity and bypass censorship. It has a very comprehensive set of tools which support almost every major operating system. TOR even has its own non-persistent operating system called TAILS, which forgets all user data once the system is turned off.

All you have to do is download their browser bundle from https://www.torproject.org/. Using it is pretty straight-forward, just install it and then start TOR and click connect. In a few second a browser window will open and you can start accessing websites anonymously.

They also have an android application by the name of Orbot, but you require a rooted android in order to use it.

Using a VPN

VPN or virtual private network is also a good way to bypass censorship. It is even more useful if you want to route all your computer traffic through another network. TOR might help you with browsing, but it won’t make your Outlook or Skype use their network. With VPN you can have any and all your applications route their traffic through the VPN server, hence bypassing all censorship on your network.

If you intend to use a VPN regularly, or use it for high bandwidth consumption activities, it would be a better idea to pay for a reliable VPN provider like TunnelBear or HideMyAss.

If you are just a casual user, who only occasionally needs to use a VPN you can use HotSpot Sheild to bypass censorship.

If your bandwidth consumption is low, TunnelBear is a very reliable VPN provider. They have a monthly cap of 500MB per month for free users. They also have iOS and android apps for your mobile devices.